Tag: Obama administration

The Assault on Freedom of the Press

The war with the press did not start with Donald Trump. It began under George W. Bush and expanded when Barack Obama went after New York Times reporter James Risen in that administration’s prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, a former undercover CIA agent accused of espionage. The Justice Department wanted Mr. Risen to testify at the …

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CIA Torture Rears Its Ugly Head Again

Torture is back in the news with the nomination of the Central Intelligence Agency Deputy Director Gina Haspel, who ran the black site at which Abu Zubaydah was detained and interrogated, to head the agency. She personally supervised the torture of Zubaydah who was waterboarded 183 times over the course of one month and lost …

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FOIA Revelations Show Administration Role In Occupy Crackdown

DHS documents were released to Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) that despite extensive redactions reveal a greater administration role than previously known in the crackdown on the Occupy movement.

The release is described on the PCJF website:

Homeland Security Documents Show Massive Nationwide Monitoring of Occupy Movement

Documents just obtained by the PCJF from its FOIA request show massive nationwide monitoring, surveillance and information sharing between the Department of Homeland Security and local authorities in response to Occupy. The PCJF, also on behalf of author/filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee, has made a series of FOIA demands regarding law enforcement involvement in the Occupy Crackdown. …

This set of released materials reveals intense involvement by the DHS’ National Operations Center (NOC) in these activities. The DHS describes the NOC as, “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management. The NOC is the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room and DHS Leadership for domestic situational awareness and facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”

Documents are available in 3 pdfs here, here and here.

My White House is Solar Cool. Mr. President, why isn’t yours?

Sometimes, your kids tell you great things.

We have the coolest house on the street.

Wow.  

We’re cool — according to the kids.  

Certainly isn’t the non-existent slide for the pool that isn’t there.  

Our lack of a huge media room and the glaring absence of a gym didn’t contribute.  

And, while I’ve always thought it cool that we live on the white house of the street, that isn’t it either.  

My fourth-grader son explained to me why it’s cool:

Because we know where our electricity comes from.

Last fall, facing a bit of pressure (mainly from 350.org) about the absence of solar from the White House roof since the Reagan Administration took off the panels President Carter put it, the Administration promised that the White House would have solar panels up on the roof “before the end of spring”.

As of today, 15 June 2011, the White House still doesn’t have solar panels on it.

The clock is ticking as even with climate disruption messing up our seasons, spring still ends 20 June …  

Detective work – bin Laden w/UpDate

This is what should have happened directly after and as to 9/11! Terrorism is a criminal offense, international criminal terrorism is an international crime. We had the backing of most of the World then, meaning working with them and their resources added to ours. There should never have been Iraq and all that went with that as well as the added recruiting tools in Afghanistan. Once the Taliban were driven from there we should have worked to reign in the ghost al Qaeda while helping to rebuild Afghanistan after decades of war destruction, as we promised. But we walked away once again, like we did after the Afghan/Soviet debacle, rest is the present history as we created the next generations of bin Ladens, already out there!!

VIDEO: Dennis Kucinich’s Madison,WI Speech!!

Dennis Kucinich electrified the crowd in Madison, WI with this speech, and declaration of Revolution.



Dennis Kucinich, the last Democrat in Washington left.

Transcript of this amazing speech is below the fold.

Getting to a better building …

Construction and use of buildings account for a major share of global warming emissions. Depending on how one calculates, allocating roughly 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to this built infrastructure is roughly correct.  Heating … cooling … lighting … building materials … etc, it all adds up (and up … and up).  A good share of the building GHGs relates back to energy usage — where, after all, does the lion’s share of coal-generated electricity end up other than illuminating our entertainment systems and over-cooling during summer heat?

A simply reality: tremendous room exists for efficiency measures at not just cost effective but, in fact, profitable financial rates of return.  That energy efficiency has remained an under-exploited  example of a win-win-win space means that it remains a place for fast and effective action.

Today, President Obama focused on this win-win-win opportunity.  

WikiLeaks and What It Says About Us

It is easy to be cynical in light of the Wikileaks revelations.  The automatic believers in the worst case and the perfidious have had confirmation followed by confirmation in the past few days.  An intelligence community and a President promising greater transparency has not followed through on its lofty promises.  Do as I say, not as I do, would seem to be its modus opperandi.  While I recognize that having the strongest hand at the bargaining table is considered the key to diplomacy, the behind-the-scenes sausage factory present here only confirms the fears of many Americans.  The timing could not be worse, especially when a strong anti-government sentiment swept the GOP to power in the House.          

SCOTUS hears cases that may kill Establishment Clause lawsuits and make way for theocracy

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday on two cases that have the potential to further ease the way for theocracy in the United States.

At stake is whether or not citizens can sue when tax credits are used to fund religious education and whether or not taxpayers have the right to sue to stop it. “The Obama administration says taxpayers have no right to sue if a state uses tax funds for parochial school tuitions,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

The ‘ability to sue over church-state claims at stake‘, The Associated Baptist Press reports. A 5-4 conservative Roberts Court decision “has the potential to change the way the law handles cases dealing with government endorsement of religion.”

If the court sides with the state, one consequence could be a significant reduction in taxpayers’ ability to sue governments over violations of the First Amendment clause that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Meeting Candidate Obama, Three Years Later

I met Barack Obama in September of 2007.  Before I go any further, I need to qualify that I wasn’t granted much more than a handshake.  Still, at the time I remember being quite excited at the prospect.  The venue was the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta and as one of several volunteers I was assigned specifically to crowd control.  A large gathering of people being correctly corralled and directed into the room where the event would be held, I settled in like everyone else to enjoy the presentation.  After a lengthy number of speakers that came before Obama, most notably the R&B singer Usher, the candidate himself finally appeared.  Unsurprisingly, he was as good as advertised and I found myself nodding along with every point he made.  Oprah had but recently endorsed him, though he was still very much in a distant second place to Hillary Clinton.

Haiti and does anyone REALLY care?

Is there any news these days that is not either heartbreaking or so totally disgusting, that you feel sickened inside, or a combination of both?

The “forgotten” people of Haiti, are dying of cholera — so far 150 deaths, and some 1,500 cases reported as of today.



A woman holds her young daughter while receiving medical attention at St. Nicholas

Hospital in St. Marc, Haiti, on Friday.

It amazes me, to some degree, that the Wall Street Journal seems to have been among the first to report this outbreak:

The area, north of the heavily damaged city of Port-au-Prince, was spared most of the wrath of the earthquake, which killed more than 300,000 people. But it did absorb many of the displaced and has long suffered from a lack of clean water. Purifying the water system is difficult in the area because homes are spread relatively widely geographically. [Emphasis mine]

Health officials said they had seen at least one report indicating that the epidemic may be spreading to the Port-au-Prince area, where about 1.3 million people are still living in crowded camps. [Emphasis mine]  A woman near Port-au-Prince was reported to have experienced severe diarrhea and vomiting after visiting a local market and died within the same day. . . . .

and, this, from Reuters

OBAMA’S WAR ON THE LEFT HAS NO EXIT STRATEGY

Obama’s War On The Left Has No Exit Strategy:

  1. We’ve heard President Obama himself snidely mock a group of single payer Health Care advocates, at a Town Hall meeting, as:   “the little people“.

  2. We’ve heard the President’s own White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, bash all progressives (the very people who voted for him) and call them “FU*KING RETARDS”.
  3. And now we’ve heard the President’s own White House Spokesman, Robert Gibbs, derail that the Political Left as all just a bunch of “drug addicts“, and also crazy apparently as well (the equvialent of: “FU*king Retards” – hence a common theme emerges).
  4. We’ve also heard Gibbs insist that the agenda of “the Left” is solely to abolish the Pentagon in it’s entirety altogether, and claim that Dennis Kucinich campaigned on this point (even though Kucinich did no such thing).  And more Rush-Limbaugh-esque smears and attacks by Gibbs on “The Left” were that they would never be statisfied with Obama under any scenario, unless a full Canadian style Health Care system had been passed into Law (which is also more lying nonsense).

In answering the question: Did he still stand by his comments?“, Robert Gibbs said an unequivocal YES    (and this is about the only thing in the entire world that Barack Obama, and his administration, have ever been unequivocal about in their lives).

What we have been witnessing here is the real, behind-the-scenes, governing sentiment being expressed here by President Obama and his entire All-Neocon, All-WallStreet, Pro-WarCrimes, pro-BankOligarchMonopoly, faux-Reform administration…just finally spilling over the edges and into public view. Obama’s pure contempt and haterd of The Left is now undeniable and absolute, and can never be taken back. It was not simply the case, that he was outflanked by a minority of GOP politicians, or intimidated by Fox News. The truth is that Obama hates “The Left” and is committed to the wrong side (the Dark side) on all the important issues where real government reforms and government action is absolutely required (to reverse the damage to our Country over the last 8 years).

The man who cynically campaigned for Election purposes (not unlike Richard Nixon) on ending the Wars, and also “ending the mindset that got us into the Wars“, and on insincerely made platitudes of “change from the bottom-up” and “hope” while whoring for Campaign donatations from “the little people”, has now revealed himself to be a total Political Fraud, and a wholesale bait and switch deceiver of the public — both in his policy terms and choice of advisors (which are obvious), and now also even in his public messaging as well.

It’s important not to view these statements as mere abberations, or some sequence of unrelated events. What they are is just the inner monologue of Obama, and his political cronies, bursting out for the World to see. No mere teleprompter speech or scripted Press Conference could ever now erase that.  Only actual job firings, and real policy changes could ever display any indication that an End to Obama’s War on the Left could even be a remote, credible possibility. But we already know that we won’t be seeing any of that.

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